Why are immigrants to the United States more likely to be obese?

Yesterday chatted with a friend, he said his daughter’s classmate since he went to the United States two years, a beautiful little girl has become fat and strong, many friends should find that people around if you go to the United States to live a few years will become a lot fatter than at home. What’s going on here?

A recent study in Cell answered this question, and it turns out that changes in intestinal flora caused by immigration play an important role in the obesity process. That is, after the inhabitants of Southeast Asia moved to the United States, the intestinal flora will also be “Westernized”. It was found that the “new” immigrants’ gut strains of Prevotella are replaced by Bacillus mimicus and thus lose the bacterial enzymes associated with plant fiber degradation. When immigrants first arrive in the United States, they begin to lose their “native” flora in the gut and gradually acquire the same “foreign” flora as Europeans and Americans. However, the problem is that the newly acquired flora cannot replenish the lost flora, which reduces the diversity of the immigrants’ intestinal flora.

Gut flora diversity plays an important role in regulating host metabolism, and is influenced by the host’s long-term diet, which in turn influences the host’s diet. It was found that the longer the alien population lived in the United States, the lower the diversity of the gut flora. The study also found that the diversity of gut flora was also reduced in second-generation immigrants.

Gut flora is directly related to your eating habits and the type of diet you eat, and westernization of gut flora directly contributes to obesity.